Just two hours after the sighting in the Boston area Fort
Monmouth,
New Jersey, popped back into UFO history. At nine thirty in the morning
twelve student radar operators and three instructors were tracking nine
jets on an SCR 584 radar set when two UFO targets appeared on the
scope.
The two targets came in from the northeast at a slow speed, much slower
than the jets that were being tracked, hovered near Fort Monmouth at
50,000
feet for about five minutes, and then took off in a "terrific burst of
speed" to the southwest.

When the targets first appeared, some of the class went
outside with
an instructor, and after searching the sky for about a minute, they saw
two shiny objects in the same location as the radar showed the two
unidentified
targets to be. They watched the two UFO's for several minutes and saw
them
go zipping off to the southwest at exactly the same time that the two
radar
targets moved off the scope in that direction.

We had plotted these reports, the ones from Boston and the one
from
Fort Monmouth, on a map, and without injecting any imagination or wild
assumptions, it looked as if two "somethings" had come down across
Boston
on a southwesterly heading, crossed Long Island, hovered for a few
minutes
over the Army's secret laboratories at Fort Monmouth, then proceeded
toward
Washington. In a way we half expected to get a report from Washington.
Our expectations were rewarded because in a few hours a report arrived
from that city.

A physics professor at George Washington University reported a
"dull,
gray, smoky colored" object which hovered north northwest of Washington
for about eight minutes. Every once in a while, the professor reported,
it would move through an arc of about 15 degrees to the right or left,
but it always returned to its original position. While he was watching
the UFO he took a 25 cent piece out of his pocket and held it at arm's
length so that he could compare its size to that of the UFO. The UFO
was about
half the diameter of the quarter. When he first saw the UFO, it was
about
30 to 40 degrees above the horizon, but during the eight minutes it was
in sight it steadily dropped lower and lower until buildings in
downtown
Washington blocked off the view.

Besides being an "Unknown," this report was exceptionally
interesting
to us because the sighting was made from the center of downtown
Washington,
D.C. The professor reported that he had noticed the UFO when he saw
people
all along the street looking up in the air and pointing. He estimated
that
at least 500 people were looking at it, yet his was the only report we
received. This seemed to substantiate our theory that people are very
hesitant
to report UFO's to the Air Force. But they evidently do tell the
newspapers
because later on we picked up a short account of the sighting in the
Washington
papers. It merely said that hundreds of calls had been received from
people
reporting a UFO.

When reports were pouring in at the rate of twenty or thirty a
day,
we were glad that people were hesitant to report UFO's, but when we
were
trying to find the answer to a really knotty sighting we always wished
that more people had reported it. The old adage of having your cake and
eating it, too, held even for the UFO.